Karl Laurin, my friend and neighbor
JULY 26, 2021
Karl Laurin holds portrait of him by artist William Pfahl.
Photograph courtesy of the Estate of Karl Laurin
Everyone should have a Karl Laurin in their lives. Someone who reminds us that life is full of possibilities, that just because there are lines painted on the edge of the road we don’t have to stay between them. Karl was a true American eccentric, a man who cared deeply about people but didn’t give a damn what people thought or said about him. Karl was a modern day Thoreau, a Whitman, a Van Gogh, a Kerouac, and most of all, Karl was my friend.
Karl’s family lived next door to my wife so she knew him since she was a little girl. Karl’s father was born in Sweden and had immigrated to the Mon Valley to take a job as a blacksmith at the National Tube Works. Karl Sr. was a stern man with a fondness for hard liquor. He tried to bend his wife and child to his will like he shaped steel on an anvil, by hammering them with his fists. To help her cope with this physical and mental abuse, the family doctor prescribed tranquilizers. When Karl was just 15, his mother died of an overdose.
Several years after Karl’s mother died, his father remarried. Frances, his new wife, was a tough mountain woman from Tennessee. Karl Sr. soon found his new wife was nothing like her predecessor. Early in the marriage, Frances held up her big cast iron frying pan and in her thick southern drawl, told him, “If ya’all ever take a notion to raise your hand to me, just remember, you gotta sleep sometime, but that don’t mean you’ll necessarily be able to git up again!” Frances proved to be a better mother to Karl than his biological mother ever had been. For the rest of his life, he referred to Frances as “my mom.”
Getting off to such a rocky start in life would make a lot of boys angry and belligerent, but not Karl. He grew into a shy, sensitive, intelligent and somewhat eccentric young man which rare qualities in gritty blue collar McKeesport. Throughout his life, Karl always fit in with his surroundings about as well as a Venetian Gondola on the Monongahela.
Karl had many interests. He loved nature, history and was a big fan of the beat poets. He especially loved jazz music. My wife and her sisters have treasured memories of sitting with Karl on the porch listening to his collection of jazz records on a portable Hi-Fi. My wife still enjoys jazz and credits Karl for introducing it to her.
Karl’s first love was electronics. From an early age he would spend hours tinkering with old radios. After high school, he enrolled in Penn State earning a degree in electrical engineering. After graduation, Karl enlisted in the Air Force, so he could work with their advanced electronic equipment.
After basic and technical training, Airman Laurin was assigned to an ICBM silo buried deep beneath the Kansas prairie. At the height of the Cold War these secret nuclear missile bases were situated all over the United States ready to launch at a second’s notice. Karl was working on an Atlas missile when an accident occurred flooding the silo with toxic chemicals and radiation.
Karl spent several months in a military hospital before being given a medical discharge and a full military pension. For the rest of his life, Karl reported regularly to the VA hospital in Pittsburgh for treatment and blood transfusions. Before sending him home, an Air Force doctor advised Karl never to have children fearing that the substances he had been exposed to had altered his genes. There was a good chance that any children Karl fathered would suffer serious birth defects.
Karl returned home and moved back in with his father and stepmother. He took a job repairing televisions for Wander Sales, a local appliance store. In his free time he read, tinkered with old radios and rode his motorcycle. After his father passed away, Karl continued to live with his step mother Frances. She took care of him and he took care of her. They were as different from one another as any two people could possibly be, but they loved each other. Karl was a good son to Frances to the very end, nursing her through her final illness.
After Frances’s death, Karl settled in to the life of a confirmed bachelor. He ate most of his meals at local diners or fast food joints and let his hair grow long. For companionship, Karl joined a vintage radio club and was active in the McKeesport Art Group and the local history center. Karl was especially proud of the ribbon he won with his restored 1941 radio which he displayed with tiny palm trees in a Pearl Harbor tableau.
I met Karl when my wife and I moved into her childhood home. I took an instant liking to Karl and he became one of my best friends. Like a character out of some old sitcom, Karl was my quirky next door neighbor. We had thousands of interesting “over the fence” conversations. When I ran into Karl, my “to-do” list went out the window. Instead of weeding the garden or mowing the grass I simply enjoyed talking with my friend. Karl was a wonderful conversationalist and I learned something every time we talked.
Karl was a true eccentric. Some people affect eccentric behaviors to draw attention to themselves, but Karl was the genuine article. In over 40 years of friendship, I never knew Karl to say or do anything to impress anyone or to change their opinion of him. He was the least affected person I ever met, a kind of suburban Zen master. Karl did things because he felt like doing them in the moment. His solitary lifestyle allowed him to live life on his own terms regardless of what others thought.
People who didn’t know Karl might have thought he was a hobo who had just hopped off a northbound freight train. If a shirt was comfortable, he didn’t worry about a hole in a sleeve or a ripped pocket. A splash of paint was no reason to discard a pair of pants or a warm jacket. Karl also didn’t worry much about shaving and he cut his own hair. Perhaps because of his service related health problems, Karl’s skin had a sallow tone and a leathery texture. His teeth were crooked with a couple of noticeable gaps, yet he had a warm and friendly smile.
Karl’s laissez- faire approach to life extended to his home. After his stepmother passed away, Karl never applied a drop of paint to his house and only made repairs when absolutely necessary and then he did them in slap dash fashion. Over 20 years ago, a tree branch broke out a window pane in his living room. Karl taped a piece of sheet metal in the hole; it is still there today. One day I told Karl I saw a squirrel running in and out of his attic. Karl’s response was, “I know, but they don’t hurt anything and it’s warm in there for them.”
Over the years, I had many such conversations with Karl. On laundry days, he used to throw his clothes over a line in the backyard to dry. They often blew off the line and fell into the grass. To remedy the situation, I bought a package of clothespins and tried to give them to Karl. He refused the offer saying that picking his clothes up off the ground was good exercise. This make do approach was typical Karl. Once I noticed that the shift lever had broken on his old Honda, Karl clamped a pair of vice-grip pliers to the stub of the broken shifter to make the car drivable. When I asked him when it had broken, he thought for a second and said, “Oh, about two years ago.”
Karl Laurin’s home in White Oak.
Photograph by Jim Busch
Some years back Karl declared his backyard a “meadow.” He stopped mowing it and let nature take its course, I suppose I could have filed a complaint with the borough but I didn’t have the heart. Karl would often call me over to see the latest “wildflower” blooming in his yard. Eventually his meadow began growing into a forest with bramble bushes and several large sumac trees.
Karl moved through life at a slow, deliberate, tortoise-like pace. His body language and the rhythm of his speech made it clear that he was in no hurry. In four decades, I never saw him get excited or raise his voice. Karl was a natural wanderer, he loved exploring and took long walks and bike rides.
I never saw anyone riding a bike slower than Karl. It looked like he was pedaling in slow motion and it was a mystery to me how he managed to keep it upright. I used to see him miles away from our homes slowing rolling along. Karl was always tinkering with bikes, salvaging bits and pieces from cast off bikes to create odd looking “Frankencycles.” Just a week before he passed, Karl told me he was working on building an electric bicycle and would let me know when he finished it.
Despite his service related health issues and his questionable dietary choices, Karl remained relatively healthy until he approached his 80th birthday. Karl began experiencing leg pains and had trouble walking. He spent a few days at the VA hospital where the doctors found that he had developed heart and circulatory problems. One day I saw Karl hobbling down his sidewalk using a cane he had fashioned out of several short pieces of old gas pipe. His recycled cane was rusty and bore several shades of faded paint. It was a typical “Karl Laurin creation,” pure form follows function and absolutely unique. When I offered a cane that my mother-in-law had used; Karl thanked me but said, “This works just fine,” and went on his way.
A few weeks after this encounter, I stepped outside and was confronted with the unmistakable smell of death. I told my wife that a raccoon or a cat must have expired under one of our bushes. Returning from a trip to the grocery store I saw an ambulance and several police cars in front of Karl’s house. One of the officers told me, “The guy who lives in this house was found dead on the porch.” Immediately, I realized that the odor I had detected was my friend’s decaying body. Karl had died quietly sitting in an old lawn chair and listening to the radio on his back porch. The wisteria vines Karl let overtake his porch had hidden him from view. I must have walked within 15 feet of him several times that day without realizing what had happened. Given the state of his clothing and his home, the coroner naturally assumed Karl was “indigent.” Fortunately, the neighbors attracted by the commotion informed the official that he was a man of means saving him from a pauper’s grave.
A month after Karl’s passing, I had the honor of speaking at a remembrance of his life. One after another, people took the podium to talk about Karl’s kindness and generosity. No one spoke in the usual empty platitudes dusted off for these occasions. Every speaker recalled specific incidents where Karl had touched them deeply. One person talked about how this man who wouldn’t buy himself a new shirt, donated a thousand dollars every month to St Jude’s Hospital. A member of the McKeesport Art Group talked about how Karl would buy several paintings from young artists and then return the art to its creator saying he had nowhere to hang it. This was his way to help and encourage a struggling artist. Between humorous anecdotes of Karl’s quirkiness and eccentricities, were stories of him helping out someone in financial difficulties or doing some other good turn. I have been to a lot of funerals, but I have never heard so many heartfelt tributes to anyone than I did that day. Despite the quarantine and the fear of Covid-19, the funeral home was packed with people who simply needed to say goodbye to their good friend Karl.
For a solitary and humble man who lived a quiet life on a quiet dead end street, Karl Laurin touched a lot of lives. In many ways he was the most authentic man I have ever known. I lack the words to accurately describe what kind of a man my friend Karl was, so I will let one of his favorite authors, Jack Kerouac, from his autobiographic novel On the Road, do it for me,
“The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars, and in the middle you see the blue centerlight pop and everybody goes “Awww!”